juushika

I had a dream last night that I made a deal with a witch so that she would spare my family, the price for which was unrelenting pain in my lower back, like the witch's thumbs digging into the muscles at the base of my spine, a localized, piercing, unremitting pain. (Last night was also the onset of my period; cramping means the first 24 hours of my period is reliably my worst back pain of the month.)

1) This is beautiful imagery; it's not actually how my pain presents but my internal mythology still wants to internalize it as a metaphor for my back pain, to live alongside the black dog as a metaphor for my crazy. 2) But if that's the case, what bargain did I make and why have I not got shit from it? 3) I suppose this is the thing about chronic conditions: to assign them meaning seems to give them purpose or justification, but the valid truth is that they have none—and pointlessness is a big part of the experience. 4) Apparently Hexenschuss (literally: witch shot) is a German word for lower back pain.

I had a quiet Halloween: I took Odi for a walk while listening to Tanis, and on the way home we passed a lovingly-decorated yard, including a cluster of human-tall handmade carnivorous plants; someone was out finishing the decorations and I was able to compliment them on it. We only had four groups of trick or treaters, and Dee answered the door. One day I'd like to be energetic enough for Halloween as an event, I suppose, but I've grown content with Halloween as a season, September through the start of December, and then the long dead spread of winter after that.

My only regret, then, will be watching social media make an immediate left turn to Christmas Town. I think stretching out festivals of light (especially in modern times) deadens their effect, and would much rather embrace the dark seasons so that they have something to contrast. There's still so many haunted stories for this time of year! Sleepy Hollow's bare branches and leaf litter is best in November; there's so many books about the punishing, barren wilderness of winter (the second of Cherryh's Finisterre books is waiting on my shelf for then).

This is in-Corvallis do-nothing low-stress time and I will be damned if I've not had constant nightmares every time I go to sleep: I've been in college, been on a cruise, attended a college on a cruise ship; people have died from exploding intestines yes it was as gross as it sounds, I hid from a werewolf-cum-madman attack, and my parents got divorced. It's not the vivid, winding, surreal dreams I have upon waking, but a constant parade of them all fucking night long and I remember them all.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm anxious.

Got a quote for Gillian's initial vet visit; Devon will cover it. Will make appointment soon. Corvallis Fall Festival is next weekend because timing is shit; my father invited me and I'm not even sure yet if I want to go, least of all what's feasible. I am a constant bundle of nerves, so frazzled that I cannot concentrate on a video game (but I can read for two straight hours; I don't even know). I just.

1) Getting August was this stretched out thing and this is so fast and it's scary; it's a big responsibility and it's just sitting there in front of me, being vast. 2) In getting August I convinced myself that you could adopt a cat normally; they didn't have to show up, bedraggled and hopeful, on your doorstep for it to be magical and meaningful—AND THEN THIS ONE DID, after I'd finally dismissed that ideal. 3) I hate money. 4) I hate it a lot, you don't even realize; any issue of money triggers my anxiety, but this is like a dozen in two weeks and I hate it goddamn. 5) Everyone makes all this sound easy. Unfortunately, we're not in a magical world wherein something that ought to happen easily does, and I feel like the only one seeing the difficulties and then I have the stress of not being understood on top of the stress of being stressed.

I want to run in circles and punch things and scream and then sleep for a few solid days without even a single dream.

A dream about going back to college and going on what was pretty much another endless cruise, together in a single night? Fuck you too, brain. Yes, insurance anxiety, I know. And the cruise was more like a hotel—a hotel that checked you back in for another week whenever you went to check out, which isn't really an improvement even if I did get to take my cat along. (She spent the whole time begging for food, not unlike real life. Unfortunately the hotel only provided dog food—but she ate that happily, of course.) They weren't all-out nightmares, at this point they're too trite for that, but I could still do without and thank you kindly.

A dream about being too traumatized to be able to listen to the story of my sister's secretly kept pet guinea pig which had died, escaping into a virtual reality video game which largely featured me being attacked and eaten by zombie/vampire/nom-nom-humans monster things, and then giving a speech about the saving graces (read: you'll never have to think about real life again!) of MMOs. So what the fuck, brain; also: fuck you. I know where all of this comes from, and it comes from things like a conversation about guinea pig cage requirements and minor stresses like back pain and paperwork and generally being my miserable self, which is to say that yesterday was pretty much a calm distracting relaxing day and I still end up with this overnight, so see again: fuck you. I think I'll read for a bit before I go back to sleep.

I felt the turnaround in this cold at around 5a last night. Sleep is the hardest thing for me when I'm sick: I'm never a strong sleeper, lying down aggravates my congestion, elevated sleeping positions aggravate my back pain, and the less sleep I get the longer my illness lingers. Last night I had crazyick dreams, which I guess is no surprise. I went back to college again, rooming in a triple that was located above a library and lecture hall—which sounds really quite lovely, but for some reason you could only get to the dorms by climbing a long, steep staircase through the very middle of the lecture hall, and then going through a tunnel that opened into the low-ceiling third floor dorm. I woke up for a bit, threw an internal tantrum that I'd had another college dream and really couldn't my subconscious at least try to be original, and then forced myself back to sleep. My dream resumed; I was going to my first day of class, but while everyone introduced themselves to the professor I used my turn to throw a bitchfit about how none of this mattered because I was planning to drop out again ASAP, because this was just another one of the stupid, redundant stress dreams that I get whenever something's wrong.

Then the professor stole Devon's car and drove it into a wall and laughed at us, because now we had no way to leave and I would be forced to continue school.

I don't even know, man. My dreams are always like this: as stressful as they are intricate as they are fucking weird.

I woke up after the second bout with the dream and could breathe again. I'm hardly all better, but I'm miles beyond the extreme congestion, irritated sinuses, and lingering cough of yesterday. My lymph nodes are barely even sore—likewise my eyes and the bridge of my nose. I'm still sniffly, but I can breathe. It was a distinct and blessed turnaround, and while I shouldn't jinx it by pushing myself to hard—I foresee a movie and a nap in my future—I am nonetheless having a small, non-exhausting celebration. I'm still sick, but at least I'm recovering now.

Cruises are indeed the new anxiety dream. I don't really have words for this—I could string together some profanity, but that comes across as more energetic and humorous than I feel following the worse nightmare that I've had in a long time.

Dear Brain: Yesterday I worked on getting unsick, and we watched some really entertaining DBZ episodes and played a lot of Fragile Dreams. We had a good day. Everything was calm, the media was engaging, we spent time with Devon when he got home and that was good too. What exactly are you trying to work out via imaginary screaming fights with wait staff about whether or not I'll be able to get a goddamned vegetarian dish for dinner the next night? via imaginary screaming fights with relatives about whether or not I even have the right to ask? I know you're never really happy, and that I've been more exhausted than usual while sick and that can't be good for you either, but ... still. Yesterday was a good day. I don't understand why you did this. I really don't appreciate it.

I'm going to watch DBZ and play Fragile Dreams, now. (I'm nattering a bit about Fragile Dreams over on my gaming Tumblr, in case you were curious. It's awesome.) I'll read a bit. Actually I think I'll shower first, wash this mess away. I'm going out to Starbucks tonight for some out of the house time. Nightmares don't really get to me in the way they used to, I'm too familiar with them now—which, come to think, may have more to do with my improved acceptance of dreams than anything else. I can move past this one. But it was still a fucking miserable way to wake up.

Two nights of sleep made up of horrible, violent, terrifying nightmares, and I slept just fine. I was chased and abused and stalked and humiliated and ignored but for whatever reason—Devon posits that I knew I was dreaming, and that's possible; somehow I felt enough distance, enough remove, that even though the dream was happening to me, even thought I was objectively horrified, I could just shrug it off. I slept long and hard, and woke well-rested.

Last night began without dreams but I was up, uncomfortable, restless, and depressed, every hour or three. Eventually I just got up and watched a movie; when I went back to bed I had a dream about going back to school which was so stressful that my heart was pounding when Dev woke me up when he got up. He was able to calm me down a bit, but when I got to sleep again I had another stressful dream about going to a three-day political rally that mirrored a speech and debate event or a con—until I finally stopped attending events, went back to my dorm, and ended up adopting the animals that I found there—a kitten, an adolescent cat, a ferret, a small rodent, and two guinea pigs. Dink was one of them, although his fur was spotted black and white (but I knew it was him) and I woke up miserable and missing him.

Things with the other pigs just haven't been the same since Dink died.

I just don't get it, really—what circumstances and content it is that makes dreams into nightmares for me. Or perhaps I do. I think all of the bad stuff used to get to me, but I've grown inured to some of it by now. Desensitized by repetition. Being stalked and humiliated by an abusive ex-boyfriend? No big deal! It doesn't target my own personal fears and memories and experiences. Objectively, I know it's awful; personally, I have some distance. But man, send me back to school and I turn into a shaking mass of anxiety, because in dreams and out of dreams that is my nightmare. I toss around the idea of finishing my degree one credit at a time at a public school, because the one class I took at PSU actually did me a world of good, it got me out and working but it wasn't stressful—either by being a difficult course, or by immersing me in the college atmosphere—and so, all good things forfend, I was actually able to complete the damn thing. Doing more of that tempts me, under similar circumstances. But college—the people, the culture, the schedules, getting myself on campus, being on campus, doing homework, receiving assignments, trying to complete assignments that require me to work with others and/or come on campus even more, every bit of it adds up, it even seems to multiply, exponential growth that builds a stress greater than I can completely imagine or hope to bear.

And I dream of it, I fear it, all the damn time. I wish that I'd discovered Reed earlier, before Whitman crushed me, I wish I had completed my degree, but I wouldn't be a fulltime student again for my life. I can't.

I have more to say about why I'm thinking about college again, about the death of a Rutgers freshman and how much of all of this anxiety comes from Whitman, not just started there but was born and bred there. But I'm only just starting to realize that I'm not looking objectively at that suicide. I'm taking too personal an angle on it—this happens, I hate it, it's useless. High school for me wasn't fun but it was no big deal, socially, and I still don't understand what made it into living hell for so many people; but college, the social abandonment and ostracization in a society so isolated that when pushed out of it you had nowhere to be, and mine was only a case of that, of rejection rather than ridicule, and I can't even imagine how much worse the latter would be. But I know it happens. I want to warn people that it doesn't get better, like some magical turning point—that depending on person and circumstance it may get quickly, remarkably worse. And what do you do that when they promise you that the day after you leave high school it will all magically improve—and then you get to college and they humiliate you?

And I think those are fair concerns—and then at the same time I know I'm being so negative and hopeless that instead of encouraging a little good I'm denying even that effort. Well done, me. I don't want to think it's hopeless, that there is nothing that can be said or done to make things "get better." Awareness and dialog helps, but wearing purple ain't gonna do a goddamn thing and that breaks my heart because I understand the impulse, I do. But we're looking at a beast that a purple t-shirt can't change: a combination of the social acceptance of bullying and the prevalence of anti-queer sentiment. Just one of those by itself is a monster; together they do horrible things to kids and to promising college students but I can barely even see it, barely even fully understand it, and the size of the problem scares me.

Into nightmares, and inaction.

I do this. I hate it. I hear about someone's rape and it leaves me incapacitated by my fear of rape culture, I hear about a suicide and and it gets me stuck on my own memories and fears of the hell that can be college, and that's selfish and it does no goddamned good. It arises from sympathy and love, it is how I try to understand how I feel about others, but it all comes back to me. How self-indulgent, how privileged, that I can complain about how these big things make me feel so small and curl up into my little ball and hide. I understand the want to wear purple because I can do that, I can wash a purple shirt and put it on, that's easily within my abilities, it's concrete and it's safe. It's also largely useless, and because it is so easy and so satisfying it's all we do do: we make ourselves feel better with a t-shirt, and then go on to ignore that huge and terrifying problem that it's supposed to represent. Awareness matters. Talking about, sharing, realizing, attempting to publicize the existence of these events matters. Symbols for them can matter, too. But that's not all it takes—it just feels like all that we know how to do.

I actually haven't been that depressed, lately. I've been okay. But I interpret this all too personally. I always do. I feel hopeless and I panic and make myself sick with nightmares. It shouldn't be about me. I'm not sure, though, how to wrap my head around the rest.

I just had a dream about introducing Charles Hoy Fort to my friend, the alien. Best dream ever? I think so.

On and off, I have dreams about the guinea pigs multiplying. Actually, I have all sorts of guinea pig dreams quite often, but multiplication is a pretty common theme. In the one I can most vividly remember, the guinea pigs got loose and I had to chase after them—there were about five, not just my set of three. When I grabbed some of them, they would slip right out of my grip like those toys from the 90s did, slipping faster, even squirting away, when you panicked and tried to hold them firmer. But when I grabbed Kuzco (I think it was Kuz ... might have been Alfie) he shrunk when I squeezed him, shrunk and shrunk down to nothing—and then from the gaps between my fingers, a bunch of tiny little miniature guinea pigs slipped out and started running around, no bigger than the size of my thumb. I kept trying to catch the pigs, and they kept escaping and multiplying. There was no forward movement or story—just a lot of scurrying, grabbing, and ever more and more pigs.

Keeping that in mind:

Today I was cleaning the pig cage. First, I moved Kuzco to the small temporary/travel cage, then I emptied his half, then I gave it a temporary liner and moved Dink and Alfie over to that side. I do this every time I clean. So with everyone set up, I was halfway through cleaning D&A's larger half of the cage, shaking off poos and hay, making piles of towels ready for the wash and towels that needed to get a good shaking outside, and all of the sudden a guinea pig comes wandering around the pigloo to stand right in front of me.

I swear to god I thought I had gone crazy for a second, and that the pigs were multiplying, because one was in the travel cage and two were on the other side of a metal divider, and yet there was a piggy, standing right in front of me.

It turned out that in tugging out the towels, I had twisted the divider and opened up a small gab between divider and cage side—a gap for my too-curious Dinkster to squeeze through. He looked at me like I was crazy when I jumped away as if for once he had scared me. So there was a otally normal, boring explanation. But that half second of staring at a magically appearing unexpected pig on the wrong half of the cage was one of the most surreal moments of my life.

That is all.